Hand Planing SOS??

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Mike B

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Hi

I am currently trying to hand plane 4 boards of American White oak - 2 finished OK, 1 not touched yet, and the current one is a complete nightmare!!

Feels a bit heavier than the others and has interlocked(?) grain changing direction all over the place. Result being horrendous areas of tearout next to nice glassy areas...

Have tried closing the mouth and taking a finer cut but to no avail... I even tried putting a spacer under the back edge of the frog to raise the angle a little - helped slightly but not enough...

Anyone have any suggestions as to the best way to handle/reduce this??

Considering starting plan B - the Bonfire project!!

Cheers
Mike
 
Mike,

If you have a spare blade, you could put a back bevel on it and raise the effective cutting angle to about 60 degrees. Sometimes this problem can be overcome by a low angle set very fine - if you have something like a LN 164.

Alternatively, this is meat and potatoes for a scraper. Just put some elastoplast on your thumbs before you start!
 
Once again I can do no more than say: Wot he said. Except if you've got any of that thin flexible magnet that you sometimes get as fridge magnets, that works very well in protecting your thumbs from the heat of the scraper. Or the thumbs from an old pair of gloves. Or a scraper holder.

Cheers, Alf
 
Mike... if its any consolation I know exactly where you're coming from...

from the sound of things, it strikes me that you're most of the way to finding the solution for character like this, i.e. the good n sharp blade, fine set mouth and fine cut... if that set up is producing glassy smooth on some parts of the board, it should be capable of doing it all over... provided.....

provided you remember the first basic rule.... plane with the grain... not against it...

that rule doesn't change just cos the grain's reversing... read the grain direction where you're getting max tear out and plane to suit throughout the limit of that patch... often that means that you're working a patch from damn near every point of the compass.. pain in the proverbial, I know... but it works...

its worth sticking to it too cos once you've flattened and smoothed the board... the grain's gonna look awesome...
 
Alf/Chris

Thanks for the tip. Have had a scraper kicking around for ages but never really fancied giving it a go before...but unsurprisingly you are both absolutely spot on and it worked a treat (even if I did get a bit carried away and over scraped the board in a couple of places) Stiff fingers now though...


Mike

Thanks for the encouragement once again!
Grain here is all over the place so planing is tricky to say the very least - especially with my limited skills...


Just out of interest, when adding a back bevel to a standard bench plane to increase the effective cutting angle, I'm assuming that you achieve this with just a micro bevel on the back of the blade and then the chip breaker fits as normal but above the micro back bevel??


Thanks again.

Mike
 
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